...and Activist King Looked To The Future

November 24, 1985|By Reviewed by Manning Marable, Professor of sociology at Colgate University and author of ``Black American Politics``.

Martin Luther King Jr. . . . To the Mountaintop

By William Roger Witherspoon

Doubleday, 272 pages, $24.95

Martin Luther King Jr. personified the movement for black equality in the 1960s, a turbulent period that social historians now term the ``Second Reconstruction.`` Yet his actual accomplishments and his mistakes as a leader have been obscured by his posthumous ``deification.`` King is usually viewed in static terms, from the vantage of his famous speech, ``I Have a Dream,`` at the 1963 March on Washington.

But during most of his career, King was repeatedly criticized by other civil rights activists on many grounds. To his ideological left, Black Power advocates opposed King`s nonviolent tactics and willingness to compromise with authorities. Volatile black Congressman Adam Clayton Powell Jr. dubbed the desegregation leader ``Martin `Loser` King.`` From the right, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People`s national secretary, Roy Wilkins, frequently criticized King`s behavior. In 1967, black journalist Carl Rowan blasted King`s ``tragic decision`` opposing the Vietnam War in a controversial Reader`s Digest essay. Many intellectuals, including avant-garde writer LeRoi Jones and historian August Meier, described King as a contemporary ``Booker T. Washington,`` an accommodationist who employed conciliatory rhetoric for racial progress. In the aftermath of King`s assassination, these harsh statements were largely forgotten. King`s symbolic role inside the desegregation movement blurred the vital contributions of many others: John Lewis and Robert Moses of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, James Farmer of the Congress of Racial Equality, and Ralph Abernathy, Fred Shuttlesworth, Andrew Young and Ella Baker of King`s Southern Christian Leadership Conference.

Despite its singular value as an introductory study and photographic essay on the ``Second Reconstruction,`` William Roger Witherspoon`s ``Martin Luther King, Jr. . . . To The Mountaintop`` falls short of presenting a balanced evaluation of either the man or the movement that elevated him to international prominence. Based largely on extensive interviews with veterans of many desegregation campaigns, and on material obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, the book traces King`s political involvement from the 1955-56 Montgomery, Ala. bus boycott through the 1968 Poor People Campaign and the Memphis demonstrations. Witherspoon has a fine grasp of social history, and attempts to outline King`s public life with a degree of objectivity. But in several respects, buried beneath descriptive commentary, the narrative fails to present new insights into King`s social thought. More important, it does not illuminate the dramatic evolution of King`s political agenda in the late 1960s which placed him at odds with both the Johnson administration and the established leaders of the civil rights movement.

Witherspoon is best in presenting the familiar higlights of King`s career. In detail, he explains the socioeconomic background to the Montgomery bus boycott, and properly credits local black leader E.D. Nixon for creating the movement. The book presents each major desegregation mobilization as collective efforts, which involved thousands of religious leaders, trade unionists, students and the poor. The author illustrates convincingly that the federal government, and particularly the FBI under J. Edgar Hoover, retarded desegregation efforts on numerous occasions. The illegal harassment of King was merely one aspect of a broader attempt to check the radical direction of the movement, and to discredit those leaders who were out of favor with the Johnson administration. The books also provided critical insights on the tactical and personality differences within the coalition of civil rights organizations.

The author is somewhat less successful in documenting those instances where King failed to live up to his followers` expectations. At the height of the 1963 Birmingham demonstrations, for example, King succumbed to pressure from the Kennedy administration to suspend the SCLC`s campaign. Shuttlesworth, the local black community`s leader, threatened to defy King and oppose the compromise agreement. Witherspoon leaves the issue unresolved, noting that

``on King was the pressure of winning and losing. On King was the agony of command.`` In the aftermath of the June, 1964, Harlem race riot, King agreed to accept New York Mayor Robert Wagner`s request to help quell the

disturbance. Witherspoon agrees that King made a ``mistake`` to intervene in Harlem ``without having first conferred with black leaders.`` But he does not criticize the charge that King`s preemptive action sorely divided local blacks, and was manipulated to exonerate white officials and the police.